Technical Tips

SoC

System on chip (SoC) is an idea of integrating all components of a computer or other electronic system into a single integrated circuit (chip). It may contain digital, analog, mixed-signal, and often radio frequency functions—all on one chip. A typical application is in the area of embedded systems. A typical SoC consists of the following components connected by either a proprietary or industry-standard bus such as the AMBA bus from ARM.

·One or more microcontroller, microprocessor or DSP core(s).

·Memory blocks including a selection of ROM, RAM, EEPROM and Flash.

·Timing sources including oscillators and phase-locked loops.

·Peripherals including counter-timers, real-time timers and power-on reset generators.

·External interfaces including industry standards such as USB, FireWire, Ethernet, USART, SPI.

·Analog interfaces including ADCs and DACs.

·Voltage regulators and power management circuits.

Netlist

The word netlist can be used in several different domains, but perhaps the most popular is in the electronic design domain. In this domain, a “netlist” describes the connectivity of an electronic design.

Netlists usually convey connectivity information and provide nothing more than instances, nets, and perhaps some attributes. If they express much more than this, they are usually considered to be a hardware description language such as Verilog, VHDL, or any one of several specific languages designed for input to simulators. Netlists can be either physical or logical; either instance-based or net-based; and flat or hierarchical. The latter can be either folded or unfolded.